© Stade de France ®
Macary, Zublena et Regembal
Costantini - Architects
ADAGP - Paris - 2002
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COMPETITION  RETRO |
 Athens 1997 – THE TSAR LIVES!
Paris 2003 Saint-Denis
You couldn’t make it up… Apparently in the twilight of is career and shortly after an Achilles’ tendon operation, Sergey Bubka achieved what no other athlete has managed to this day - a sixth consecutive world gold medal. His reign stretched way back to Helsinki in 1983.
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Bubka had looked destined to abandon his throne without even being able to defend it, doomed to meekly surrender the world crown he had won so adroitly at the very first World Championships. In December 1996, just a few months before Athens, he underwent an operation on his right Achilles, an injury made all the more painful by the fact that it had barred his route to Olympic gold. Atlanta had appeared to sound the death knell on the career of the greatest pole-vaulter of all time, but retirement could not have been further from Bubka’s mind, particularly in the wake of that Olympic failure, the second since his coronation at Seoul in 1988.
No higher than 5.60m
His return to jumping was nothing short of a nightmare. “Sometimes, after training, the pain was so strong that I didn’t know how I would carry on”, Sergueï Bubka would later reveal. “But I knew that 1997, with the World Championships, was a very important year. I badly wanted to go to Athens and win a sixth consecutive title.” After months plagued by doubt, the world record holder decided to make the trip to Greece after all, without really knowing if he would be able to put up an adequate defence of his title. Up to that point, he had not yet managed to clear more than a modest 5.60m in official competition.
Redemption time
During the qualifiers, Sergueï Bubka just scraped over the 5.70m mark. “I was still suffering at that point. I only banished the pain during the final, when I ran with a better technique.” First 5.80m, then 5.86m, like a phoenix from the flames the Tsar was rising. But his Russian rival Maksim Tarasov clearly hadn’t read the script, and dealt a seemingly fatal blow to his more illustrious elder by clearing 5.96m at his first attempt. Miracle man Bubka was not to be denied though, securing gold with a majestic vault of 6.01m. The circle was complete; 14 years after his first title, Bubka had made history. The Tsar even took the liberty of attacking his own world record (6,14m), but it was not to be. He remains the only athlete to have won six golds in a row, although German discus-thrower Lars Riedel will equal his performance if he wins gold later this month at the Stade de France®.
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